Global Positioning System (GPS) car navigation systems use satellites to determine the location of the car on a map and to provide route-planning and navigation guidance, thereby avoiding the need for folded paper maps and printed directions. These personal assistant systems range from expensive factory pre-installed models that include a color display in the dashboard to more affordable and compact systems that can plug in the car's cigarette lighter. The man-machine interface is typically a touch-screen keypad display for inputting information and displaying maps from a database. However, push-buttons, joysticks and dials-based interfaces are also available. Most recent systems are DVD-based, as opposed to the earlier CD-based versions that required changing map CDs for different areas of the country. The user can typically select a destination from a variety of methods such as address, intersection, address book entry, and directly from the map. Most systems provide directions graphically and vocally. Some systems provide a 3-D capability, often called “bird's-eye view”, which can be easier to read than a 2-D map. Most navigation systems also automatically display locations of points of interest such as airports, hotels, gas stations, movie theaters, restaurants, banks and other businesses. These points of interest locations can serve as possible destinations.
One of the problems with navigation systems, however, is that the entry of a new address is often a tedious and lengthy process, during which the car has to be in park mode for safety reasons. Another problem is that the map databases and points of interest can get out of date because DVD/CDs are not updateable. The map displays are also drawings with street names as opposed to realistic images of surrounding buildings. The navigation's audio as well as Bluetooth-enabled playback of cellular calls on the car's speakers is also annoying to passengers who want to sleep or listen to uninterrupted music, radio, video, etc.
With the proliferation of cellular handsets and introduction of GPS-enabled cellular phones it is now also possible to use such handsets together with a cellular GPS navigation service to get directions. For example, Nextel offers its subscribers Motorola's ViaMoto service. The cell phone user launches an application on the Nextel handset and types in the address of the destination. The service then uses GPS and Nextel's network to send driving directions to the handset. Google has also released a version of Google Maps Mobile for devices like the Palm Treo line of smartphones, Research In Motion's BlackBerries, and many Java-capable phones from Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Additional services can also be provided such as traffic accident alerts, weather forecasts, points of interest, merchant pricing and sales information, sharing one's location with trusted people, etc. Cellular-based GPS systems have some disadvantages, however. Entering addresses into a mobile handset is difficult because it often requires pressing a number a few times to enter the correct letter. Cellular carriers' navigation systems are also not as comprehensive as portal web sites such as Yahoo and Google. The display of a typical cell phone is also much smaller than that of in-car navigation systems for display of maps and directions. More importantly, if the network coverage is lost then the navigation or map application does not work for mobile-station assisted GPS phones (i.e. phones which send their raw GPS measurement data to a server on the internet for processing, as opposed to mobile-station based phones which run the navigation layer themselves). Web searches and advertising inside a GPS-enabled car or cell phone also does not utilize the information about the position of the car/phone. Existing navigation systems use only map data but do not include up-to-date traffic and weather report information and can thus lead the user to traffic jam areas.
Thus, there remains a need for a navigation system that is capable of downloading and synchronizing address or other contact information, calendar data, map data, and other data or information from cell phones, PDA's or web site portals.
One of the main impediments to using car navigation systems (or any other moving object for that matter) is the tedious and long process of entering destination addresses on touch-screen keypad displays. Using voice commands to enter an address is also not easy because the recognition engine has to get all parts of an address (street name, number, city, state, and zip code) correct in the typically noisy car environment. However, we often have access to many addresses in various address books on internet web sites such as Yahoo! Address Book on PDAs and cell phones. For example, Palm offers convergence devices that are phones as well as PDAs with contact and calendar functionality. Such devices also come with synchronization software that will compare contacts and appointments on the device with those on a central database and keep them in agreement.
Generally, navigation systems allow manual entry and storage of a limited number of addresses. However, manual entry of destination addresses and manipulating dials while driving often decreases the driver's ability to drive safely. Because of this liability, navigation systems may not allow manual entry of addresses if the car is in motion. Speech interfaces allow drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and minimize driver distraction. Speech interfaces have been introduced into a number of automobiles for navigation and entertainment systems (e.g., see M. J. Hunt, “Some experience in in-car speech recognition”, IEEE Colloquium on Interactive Dialogue Systems for Telephony Applications, 1999; and A. L. Kun, W. T. Miller III, A. Pelhe, R. L. Lynch, “A software architecture supporting in-car speech interaction”, IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, Jun. 14-17, 2004, pp. 471-476). These speech systems are not natural conversational speech processing but instead resemble voice buttons that are based on a fixed grammar for particular task domains. This is sufficient for navigation applications where the task are well defined such as looking up addresses, finding points of interest, and route planning. However, the proposed method can also be used with natural language processing engines (e.g., see L. Cavedon et. al., “Developing a Conversational In-Car Dialog System”, In the 12th International Congress on Intelligent Transportation Systems, San Francisco Calif., USA, 2005).
There are two types of GPS-enabled phones. Most of today's GPS-enabled phones are mobile-station assisted. These phones take their raw GPS measurements (e.g., pseudo ranges, pseudo Doppler, time, etc.) and send them to a server on the internet for calculating values such as position and velocity. The GPS functionality of these phones will not work if their cellular network coverage is lost because they will no longer be able to connect to the internet. Some of the next generation phones, however, will be mobile-station based where they have their own GPS receiver that runs the navigation layer for processing the raw measurements. The GPS functionality of these phones will work even if their cellular network coverage is lost.
While speech interfaces reduce driver distraction they do not ease the tedious address entry problem. Even with a speech interface the user still has to specify each part of the address (state, city, zip code, street, number) separately and wait for the car's text to speech engine to repeat back the entry for confirmation.
Conventional methods for client location-based advertising use IP addresses, registered addresses/zip codes and telephone numbers. All of these have limitations. Dynamic IP addresses limit the use of fixed IP address methods. The registered address/zip code and phone number of a mobile user do not indicate his/her current location. Furthermore, these methods (IP addresses, addresses/zip codes and telephone numbers) cover large geographical areas and do not provide the fine location accuracy provided by GPS systems. GPS provides positional coordinates in terms of longitude, latitude, and altitude. Addresses may also be specified by users in terms of postal codes.
The present invention provides systems and methods for improved GPS navigation.